Might the beginning of Lent not be an appropriate time for a little
repentance, asks Christopher Booker.

As the roof continues to fall in on them, in an endless succession of scandals, the beleaguered defenders of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have at last managed to mount a riposte by coming up with a "scandal" of their own. Under the headline "fabricated quote used to discredit climate scientist", The Independent recently trumpeted that a quotation attributed by "climate sceptics" to Sir John Houghton – one of the IPCC's founders and long a key figure in the production of its increasingly alarmist reports as chairman of its scientific Working Group I – was an invention. Sir John was now insisting, as he again did in a letter to last week's Observer, that he never said it or anything like it.

The sentence the former head of the UK Met Office now denies ever using – although in the past four years it has been cited unchallenged more than 100,000 times on the internet – was "unless we announce disasters, no one will listen". In what looked like a concerted operation, Sir John's disclaimer was circulated to sympathetic journalists across the world, along with demands for corrections and apologies issued to various prominent "climate sceptics" who had publicly quoted the remark, including Dr Benny Peiser, director of Nigel Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation, Roger Helmer MEP, Lord Monckton, and the Australian geologist Professor Bob Carter.

It was also asked, through this paper, that I publish a correction, because I quoted the sentence in my recent book The Real Global Warming Disaster – although I have never done so in these pages. Like many others, I was misled by the internet into assuming the quote, attributed to a book written by Sir John in 1994, was genuine, and that it must have been removed from the later edition I used when compiling my own account of the global warming story. Naturally, in the face of Sir John's insistence that he never said it, we shall all in due course take steps to correct the record, as I shall do in the next edition of my book.

But what also came to light, thanks to that admirable expert on "risk", Professor John Adams, and Professor Philip Stott, who for years was almost the only voice critical of climate hysteria in the British press, is an interview Sir John gave to The Sunday Telegraph in its "Me and My God" slot on September 10, 1995. As a fervent evangelical Christian, Sir John claimed that global warming might well be one of those disasters sent by God to warn man to mend his ways ("God tries to coax and woo but he also uses disasters"). He went on: "If we are to have a good environmental policy in the future, we will have to have a disaster".

Maybe these are not quite the words that have been so widely misquoted. But if Sir John believes it is time for us all to don sackcloth and ashes, perhaps he himself could meditate on the way in which, a few years back, he was tireless in promoting the notorious "hockey stick" graph, used by the IPCC to fool the world into thinking that global temperatures had lately been soaring to levels unprecedented in history. This turned out to be the greatest scientific error in the IPCC's history.

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Even after the "hockey stick" had been devastatingly exposed as no more than the result of trickery with a computer program, an "invention" far more damaging than any misquoting of his own words, Sir John was still defending it in front of the US Congress as if it were gospel truth. As a propagandist, he might still do the same today. But as a Christian scientist, might the beginning of Lent not be an appropriate time for him to engage in a little repentance of his own?